IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pmed00/1003064.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Drought and intimate partner violence towards women in 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa during 2011-2018: A population-based study

Author

Listed:
  • Adrienne Epstein
  • Eran Bendavid
  • Denis Nash
  • Edwin D Charlebois
  • Sheri D Weiser

Abstract

Background: Drought has many known deleterious impacts on human health, but little is known about the relationship between drought and intimate partner violence (IPV). We aimed to evaluate this relationship and to assess effect heterogeneity between population subgroups among women in 19 sub-Saharan African countries. Methods and findings: We used data from 19 Demographic and Health Surveys from 2011 to 2018 including 83,990 partnered women aged 15–49 years. Deviations in rainfall in the year before the survey date were measured relative to the 29 previous years using Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data, with recent drought classified as ordinal categorical variable (severe: ≤10th percentile; mild/moderate: >10th percentile to ≤30th percentile; none: >30th percentile). We considered 4 IPV-related outcomes: reporting a controlling partner (a risk factor for IPV) and experiencing emotional violence, physical violence, or sexual violence in the 12 months prior to survey. Logistic regression was used to estimate marginal risk differences (RDs). We evaluated the presence of effect heterogeneity by age group and employment status. Of the 83,990 women included in the analytic sample, 10.7% (9,019) experienced severe drought and 23.4% (19,639) experienced mild/moderate drought in the year prior to the survey, with substantial heterogeneity across countries. The mean age of respondents was 30.8 years (standard deviation 8.2). The majority of women lived in rural areas (66.3%) and were married (73.3%), while less than half (42.6%) were literate. Women living in severe drought had higher risk of reporting a controlling partner (marginal RD in percentage points = 3.0, 95% CI 1.3, 4.6; p

Suggested Citation

  • Adrienne Epstein & Eran Bendavid & Denis Nash & Edwin D Charlebois & Sheri D Weiser, 2020. "Drought and intimate partner violence towards women in 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa during 2011-2018: A population-based study," PLOS Medicine, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(3), pages 1-17, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pmed00:1003064
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003064
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003064
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003064&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003064?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Linda Theron & Motlalepule Ruth Mampane & Liesel Ebersöhn & Angie Hart, 2020. "Youth Resilience to Drought: Learning from a Group of South African Adolescents," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(21), pages 1-14, October.
    2. Bethuel Sibongiseni Ngcamu & Felix Chari, 2020. "Drought Influences on Food Insecurity in Africa: A Systematic Literature Review," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(16), pages 1-17, August.
    3. Yaqing Gao & Yinping Wang & Xiaoyi Mi & Mo Zhou & Siyu Zou & Hong Zhou, 2021. "Intimate Partner Violence against Women Living in Inadequate Conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Meta-Analysis of Demographic and Health Survey Data," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(19), pages 1-12, September.
    4. Díaz, Juan-José & Saldarriaga, Victor, 2023. "A drop of love? Rainfall shocks and spousal abuse: Evidence from rural Peru," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).
    5. Algur, Kisan Dilip & Patel, Surendra Kumar & Chauhan, Shekhar, 2021. "The impact of drought on the health and livelihoods of women and children in India: A systematic review," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    6. Husen Maru & Amare Haileslassie & Tesfaye Zeleke & Befikadu Esayas, 2021. "Analysis of Smallholders’ Livelihood Vulnerability to Drought across Agroecology and Farm Typology in the Upper Awash Sub-Basin, Ethiopia," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(17), pages 1-28, August.
    7. Leso Munala & Elizabeth M. Allen & Andrew J. Frederick & Anne Ngũnjiri, 2023. "Climate Change, Extreme Weather, and Intimate Partner Violence in East African Agrarian-Based Economies," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(23), pages 1-14, November.
    8. Mavisakalyan, Astghik & Otrachshenko, Vladimir & Popova, Olga, 2024. "Natural Disasters and Acceptance of Intimate Partner Violence: The Global Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 17172, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pmed00:1003064. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosmedicine (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.